


Lost Voices

by Mierke



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 17:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4755098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mierke/pseuds/Mierke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Willow's experiment turns Sunnydale in silent chaos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost Voices

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SRoni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SRoni/gifts).



> Written for [](http://buffy-genfic.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://buffy-genfic.livejournal.com/)**buffy_genfic**. For the Willow round, magic  & technology, with the prompts:  
>  _Willow mixing magic and technology, liquid spilled on a laptop and mass chaos as a result, Willow saves the day_  
> 

_Experimental log, entry 21_

_Ismene is entirely programmed. I've attuned her to my own voice, and she is ready to be tried out._

_The calculations for my Recording Potion seem to be in order. The potion itself is currently simmering, as it will need to do for another hour. This one, as well, has been attuned to my own voice. I've set the pen aside that I want to soak in the potion (I considered using a quill, because this all seems so Harry Potter, but in the end that didn't seem particularly practical)._

_Phase one has almost been completed. I can hardly wait to begin phase two!_

* * *

With a smile Willow stretched, her lips twisting into a grimace as some painful kinks in her shoulder made themselves known. She was happy, though. Her projects were coming along greatly, and she couldn't wait to try them out. If she had actually succeeded in finding a way to record the lectures - two ways even, maybe! - then life as a student had just become so much simpler. She would work on a way to subtract the information that came straight out of the textbook from the recordings next, maybe, but she shouldn't get ahead of herself. She hadn't even begun testing yet.

"I need some air," she told Buffy, who was sitting at her desk, doing her own studenty stuff. Willow was never quite sure what Buffy was working on; after Willow's first overenthusiastic attempts at helping Buffy study, her friend usually kept what she was doing to herself, except for when she really needed help. Buffy would enjoy the recording tools too, Willow thought happily.

"Be careful," her friend said, not even looking up from her books. 

"Always am," she replied. "Brought a stake even!"

"Be back before dark!" she heard just before closing the door and she smiled. It was a good day to be out, and the sun was still relatively high in the sky. She said hi to a couple of people she recognised and sat down somewhere on a bench, with her feet kicking under her and her mind full of happy thoughts. 

She had been working on the project for over a month now, and she was really excited about finally getting a chance to try it out. She had missed this, she realised; she had missed the high of an intellectual thrill that overtook her mind and let her really ponder things. Sure, university was lots of fun, but the classes were relatively easy. And while demonics were challenging, she kinda preferred the challenge that didn't come with a life or death situation.

A couple of people walking past greeted her, and Willow waved back, calling out a hi to them. That is, she tried to call out to them. But even though she opened her mouth and her lips and tongue formed the words, no sound came out. It wasn't the kind of no sound that came with getting a cold, either. It was just... no sound at all. 

For a split second she thought the Gentlemen were back, but even before the panic could settle in, she realised that around her, people were still talking. Just her, then. Maybe it had been a fluke?

She tried again, and again, and again, until she was shouting at the top of her lungs and still she didn't make a sound. Getting a bit anxious now, she made her way back to the dorm.

* * *

"Will, are you okay?" Buffy asked the moment Willow walked in, banging the door open in fear and anger and the relief at being able to make _some_ sound even though it didn't come from her throat.

She shook her head at Buffy, and gestured to indicate she couldn't talk. 

"The Gentlemen again?" Buffy asked, her voice wavering, but Willow shook her head vigorously and gestured to her friend. 

"Right. I'm still talking," Buffy murmured, though Willow could tell she still wasn't entirely convinced. A shudder ran over her friend's back and Willow couldn't blame her. No matter that they beat them in the end, those things had been _scary_.

Buffy got up from her desk and walked over towards Willow to feel her throat, probably more in a gesture of caring than in any real conviction that she could diagnose what was going on.

"I don't have mom's-" 

Buffy stopped in the middle of her sentence, and confused Willow looked at her. Buffy's eyes had widened and her mouth was still moving, but it still took Willow a moment to catch up. 

"Your voice!" she tried to say, but of course her lips just formed the words while no sound came out. Buffy grabbed at her own throat now, confusion written all over her face. She grabbed her stake and then Willow's hand, dragging her out of the dorm. She didn't tell Willow where they were going, but she didn't have to. A good thing they could communicate without words after all these years; they were going to need it.

They ran into Xander on their way to Giles, and he greeted them with his usual exuberance. 

"Hello, my ladies, how are-"

His arms, which had come to rest on both of their shoulders, started flailing as he grabbed for his throat. While Willow couldn't hear what he was saying, she recognised the words his lips were forming even without looking.

"Can't talk, can't talk!" 

She and Buffy pointed to their own throats and shook their heads, while Xander was still trying to produce a sound. Buffy grabbed his hand, too impatient to wait for him to calm down, and started dragging him along to Giles’. Willow followed at her own pace, pondering what was going on. There was something niggling at the back of her mind, something important, but she hadn't yet figured out what it was. 

Oh!

She knew what was going on! Or, at least, she knew what was happening. She jumped up and down to get her friends' attention, the slap of her shoes on the pavement causing them to turn around. But when she realised she had no idea how to explain what was going on without words, she only motioned for them to hurry up. 

When they finally arrived at Giles', Buffy slammed the door open in the same fashion as Willow had opened the dorm's door. 

"Hello?" Giles called, and with a frustrated, inaudible sigh they all realised their automatic answers of "It's us" went by unnoticed. He came out of his office, crossbow in hand, and while Willow's and Xander's immediate reaction was to throw their hands up in the air, Buffy's instincts had her rushing out to eliminate the threat. 

Willow realised too late what Buffy was going to do; she tried to grab her friend to stop her, but couldn't prevent Buffy from tackling Giles. 

"Buffy!" she shouted, and ended up stomping her foot on the ground to show her indignation when she realised, again, that she couldn't be heard. It was hard to remember that you could produce no sound when everything, even talking, felt so normal. 

Buffy was helping Giles up, who was rubbing his head and, if the movement of his lips were any indication, mumbling something along the lines of "Bloody Slayers" and "could have used a warning." Willow could tell the exact moment he was aware of the lack of sound; his eyes closed in fear, exasperation, or a bit of both, and a couple of moments after she could see research mode kicking in. 

Giles got the whiteboards that they had used when the Gentlemen had terrorised the town, and handed them out.

"What is going on?" he wrote on his own, looking at each of them pointedly as if somehow they had caused this. In a way, Willow figured, they probably had.

"Lost voices," she wrote, giving up on proper sentencing to be able to convey as much information as possible on the small whiteboard. "Contaminated by touch."

She looked pointedly at Buffy as she showed her board, and was satisfied to see that at least her friend looked a bit sheepish. Buffy shrugged, an "I didn't mean to" clearly written all over her face, and Willow smiled at her. 

"How?" Giles' board read, and both Xander and Buffy looked to Willow as if she should have the answer. 

"I'm not sure," she admitted on her own board. "Was sitting outside when it was suddenly gone."

Xander tapped on his board to get their attention. 

"Spell?" it read. 

Willow shrugged.

"Possibly," she wrote back. 

"Ethan?" Buffy's board asked, she herself looking ready to pummel the guy into oblivion. As one they all turned to Giles, who shrugged as if to say "I haven't seen him". He stood up to get some books from his library, and divided them. They didn't even need to hear the customary "Let's hit the books" to start researching.

After about an hour, Willow looked up from an interesting page (that had nothing to do with what was going on, but she wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to learn about fire magic; after all, that could come in handy with vampires, so it was still researching!) when a crumbled piece of paper hit her books. 

"Wills, I have to confess something," it read in Buffy's handwriting; Willow looked up to see Buffy seemingly engrossed in her work and she read on. "I accidentally spilled your potion over your laptop. I cleaned it up immediately! And I think I got it all dry and stuff. I'm sorry."

Willow was going to write back that it didn't matter, when suddenly it all made sense. She thumped the table three times to get everyone's attention and held up Buffy's note in victory (wincing as Buffy kicked her shins to shut her up, a little harder than she had planned - or so Willow hoped). 

Giles gave her a piece of paper and a pen, and Willow started to write. She explained how she had been working on a potion and an artificial intelligence to record her lectures, how she had been at the final stages of the experiment and had been so excited that she had to go stretch her legs for a bit. She went on to say how Buffy had just confessed that she had tipped over the potion, and that she was pretty sure one had something to do with the other.

"It all makes sense," she wrote. "The potion was attuned to my voice, as was the AI. And I was the first to lose my voice. And the AI is, obviously, self-learning, so I think somehow the magic is entering each person's signature into the AI after they've been in contact with someone whose signature is already known by the computer."

As she looked up, excitement all over her face - because this was cool; okay, not as practical right now as she had hoped her inventions would be, but still cool! - she met with three blank stares. After a beat, Giles started to write.

"Go back to your dorm to investigate; we will keep looking at other possibilities."

Willow shrugged and collected her things. She was sure she was right, but Giles had a point; you could never be too careful on the Hellmouth, and if there were other things that could have caused this, they should not ignore them. Buffy tapped her on her shoulder.

"Hurry," her board said. "I can't slay if I can't pun."

* * *

Willow hurried back to her dorm, a little alarmed when it turned out that the silence had started to spread. Someone must have touched them when they were walking to Giles' - she vaguely remembered someone rushing past in a hurry, who must have come in contact with a shoulder or a hand or something - and they in turn had contaminated lots of other people.

She carefully avoided contact with anyone who still seemed to have a voice, and sped up just a little bit more. At Giles', she had still thought this was mostly just them and it had all seemed _fun_ , but this was starting to get serious. 

She closed the door of the dorm behind her, and let out a sigh that no one could hear. She tentatively took the few steps needed to get to her desk, and turned the screen of her laptop back on. It was filled with words in different colours; at first, it didn't make sense to her, but after a while she could make out different conversations among the sentences. 

She sat down and experimentally opened her mouth to say something.

"Are you recording this?" she asked, holding her breath as she saw the words appear on the screen, gone from the top of the screen almost as quickly as they had appeared because all over town people were still trying to talk. 

This definitely had something to do with her experiment, which at the least gave her a starting point to work on the solution. She took the book that she had used to create her recording potion, and started looking for antidotes for its ingredients. Thyme to counteract the sage, chalk to counteract the carbon, ginseng to counteract the gingko... 

It had taken her weeks to perfect the initial formula, but the silence that crept inside through her windows was becoming more and more deafening and Willow was painfully aware that she didn't have as much time to work on the cure.

The list of ingredients done, Willow collected the things she needed from her stash. It was a good thing she was always so prepared, she thought grimly; she didn't particularly want to go out any more than she had to. She had everything she needed, but just brewing the potion and hoping tipping it into her laptop would be enough wasn't much of a plan. What if it actually destroyed her laptop, and her only chance of reversing the effects were gone? 

Wait! She probably shouldn't use it in a potion at all, Willow suddenly realised. If she was looking to reverse the effects, maybe she should also reverse the way it was applied. Let it burn instead of soak. Getting a little excited now that she was closer to the solution, she started to prepare a pouch that she could burn. 

Burning meant she needed to find the right spell and...

Oh.

Willow sagged down in her chair, a sudden wave of defeat washing over her. She couldn't talk. She couldn't call upon the goddesses to help her, and without their help it wouldn't matter how much herbs she burned, nothing would happen. She needed someone with a voice. Someone with a voice and with magic, so that left... Tara, hopefully.

The pouch done, she started leafing through her books to find a starting point to write her spell. She needed to call on Hecate and Athena, preferably from both within and without her computer. That was easy, she suddenly realised; if she and Tara could say the spell together, her voice would say it from within the computer while Tara's would say it from without. 

The solution was now all the way realised. All that was left to do was to find Tara, pray she still had a voice - and get her back to her dorm without touching her or having her touch anyone else. Willow didn't want to risk taking her laptop; with the chaos that reigned outside, the chances of it breaking on her way there were too high. 

She opened her door and started slowly making her way towards Tara's dorm, all the while trying to figure out a foolproof way of getting Tara back with her without making any human contact. She was only halfway and had already bumped into three people (good thing she had decided to leave her laptop). 

Standing in front of Tara's door, she hadn’t come up with a solution, but she was hopeful that it would sort itself out. She knocked, swaying a bit on her feet in a silent prayer that Tara still had her voice. When the girl opened her door, she held up her first piece of paper which said "DON'T TOUCH ME!"

Tara recoiled and took a step back, and Willow hastily held up the next piece of paper ("Lost voice. Spreads by touch.") and the next ("Need your help.").

Tara’s pose relaxed and she motioned at Willow to come in, carefully keeping some distance between them.

"How c-can I help?" she asked, and Willow thought she had never been as happy to hear anyone actually talk to her (except maybe for that one time after Xander had given her the silent treatment when they were 8 and he hadn't talked to her for a day). She actually jumped in excitement, pointing to Tara with a big grin on her face, motioning towards her throat. 

"You n-need my voice?" Tara asked.

Willow nodded and held up her next two papers: "Need a spoken spell." and "Can't touch anyone between here and my dorm."

Tara opened the door to look out into the hallway, and immediately closed it again.

"H-how are we going to do that?"

Willow perked up, the solution suddenly obvious to her. She scanned the room for some pen and paper and wrote down, simply, "Magic."

Focussing her energy, she created a kind of bubble around Tara, then let it go.

"Should probably test it first," she wrote, and created the bubble around herself. Opening the door, she took a deep breath and took a couple of steps outside. Feeling slightly guilty (just in case it didn't work), she walked through the hallway, taking no care at all to avoid people, whether they were still talking or not. 

Some guy ran towards her and would have collided with her, but he bounced back on the shield she had conjured around herself. With a smile on her face she turned back to Tara, ignoring the enraged shouts of the guy who felt it was her fault that he had crashed against the wall. 

She breathed out and let the magic fade; with her next breath in, she focussed her magic around Tara. Motioning for Tara to hurry up (because she wasn't sure how long she could keep this up and it had to work, it just had to), she hurriedly made her way back to the dorm. 

A relieved sigh escaped the two of them when they closed the door behind them, and Willow could just catch herself before giving Tara a celebratory hug. Smiling sheepishly at her own stupidity, she let go of the magic she was still holding and motioned towards the desk. 

She held up a piece of paper and gave it to Tara, who looked it over and smiled. 

"This s-should work," she said, and Willow grimaced, not entirely confident. She held up three fingers, and counted down.

_Goddess Hecate, Goddess Athena, we invoke you,_  
_Release our voices from their binds,_  
_Remove Ismene from our minds,_  
_Beloved goddesses, grant our wishes..._

She took a match and set fire to the pouch, blowing on it until it smoked but didn't burn. She held it underneath her laptop, letting the smoke crawl in and around the computer as they repeated the chant.

She could feel the magic underneath her skin, could feel how it started taking hold of the blood in her veins. She smiled at Tara, secure in the knowledge that she could feel it too, seeing her own emotions reflected in Tara's eyes. It always felt good to practice magic; she only wished there were more reasons for it, other reasons, circumstances that weren't quite so dire. 

With a snap her laptop closed and wide-eyed, she looked at Tara. 

"D-did it work?"

Willow shrugged, a little scared to open her mouth and try it out. Shaking away her fear, she took a deep breath and said: "It should have."

She started grinning as soon as she heard the sound of her own voice.

"We did it!" she said, excitement and awe and relief all crashing through her. "We actually did it!"

* * *

_Experimental log, entry 22_

_The combination of magic and electronics has turned out to yield some… interesting results. There are a few important lessons to be learned from what happened today:_  
_\- Keep potions away from computers (especially when Buffy is nearby)._  
_\- Ismene has proven to be, in fact, self-learning._  
_\- Always know how to reverse the magic's effects._

_I have reset Ismene and will rebrew the Recording Potion tomorrow. Testing will continue as planned at the beginning of next week._


End file.
